Canada The Unknown Country

Here's a chilling ghost story from the First World War... It was a frosty night in April of 1917 when Cpl. Will Bird and two of his comrades from the 42nd Battalion of the Canadian Black Watch lay dozing on the cold floor of a dugout near Vimy Ridge. Sometime before dawn, the shivering 26-year-old Nova Scotia native was roused from his fitful slumber by two warm hands on his back. Bird opened his eyes expecting to see one of his squad mates gently shaking him awake. Instead he found himself staring into the face of his dead brother Steve; the young man had been killed in action with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France nearly two years earlier. The mysterious apparition uttered not a single word as he gazed lifelessly into Bird's eyes. It then rose and silently walked from the dugout, but not before beckoning the astonished young soldier to follow. Bird scurried after his lost sibling and trailed the spirit out into No Man’s Land. He continued the pursuit over to the bombed out ruins of a house on the edge of the battlefield. Before he could call out to his brother, the shadowy form disappeared into the darkness and was gone. Overcome with emotion, Bird collapsed amid the rubble and lost consciousness. He woke several hours later and rushed back to his place in the line only to find that his bunker was nothing more than a smoking crater. Sometime after the eerie encounter, an enemy shell had slammed into the dugout killing all inside. Bird would survive the war and go on to become a prolific writer and journalist. For the rest of his life, he was convinced that his brother's spirit had intentionally saved his life that night. Later, Bird recorded the entire puzzling experience in a book entitled 'Ghosts Have Warm Hands.' (NOTE: image here is of the remains of a German soldier outside a dugout near Beaumont Hamel, November 1916. It is part of the Ministry of Information First World War Official Collection and is now held by the Imperial War Museums)